Kesha swings back with a swagger at the Aragon

Kesha performs at the Aragon Ballroom, Oct. 18, 2017.

(Terrence Antonio James / Chicago Tribune)

Joshua KleinChicago Tribune

We often assume the worst about our pop stars. That they’re fake. That they’re manufactured frauds. That they’re puppets. What sometimes gets lost in the shuffle is that they’re human too, and it’s sadly ironic that lifting the veil of artifice can invite punishment as much as praise.

So it went with Kesha’s multi-year legal battle against an allegedly abusive producer, which further revealed the ugliness of the music industry and kept her spinning her creative wheels off-stage while her survival story played out. But Kesha’s audacious comeback album “Rainbow” showed she wouldn’t be backed into a corner as a victim. The album finds Kesha swinging back, her swagger as apparent in its stylistic audacity as in the defiant attitude of her lyrics, and her brash performance at the Aragon on Wednesday night proved the fighting spirit of the disc was no fluke.

Confiding she had woken up that morning “sick as a dog” and warning that her voice might not make it through the night, Kesha nonetheless refused to take it easy. From the stridently feminist first song “Woman” on, she was flipping middle fingers and dropping f-bombs, punctuating songs with increasingly hoarse screams, and reaffirming multiple times her dedication to human rights in all its forms. If the amped-up club anthem “We R Who We R” or the more pointedly personal “Learn to Let Go” ultimately shared a similarly broad message, the new Kesha was all about context, and the ecstatic crowd (who gave her a folk-hero’s welcome) did not need to be clued in to the source of her combativeness.

Yet it was Kesha’s shift to twang that proved most surprising, with the Nashville native (at one point joined by her songwriter mom) going convincingly country for a stretch, demonstrating with the likes of “Spaceship” and “Godzilla” that she could be just as effective a singer and performer operating with subtlety as when blasting through, say, the stomping “Boogie Feet.” By the time she made it to her once ubiquitous single “Tik Tok” you could tell Kesha had pushed her voice to the breaking point, but the night’s goal was less about perfection and more about leaving the stage (and her fans) emotionally stronger.